A blank canvas is full of possibility. If you have an idea for a user experience, how do you turn it into a beautiful and effective user interface? This covers covers principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn concrete strategies to create user interfaces, including key lessons in typography, information architecture, layout, color, and more. You’ll learn particular issues that arise in new device contexts, such as mobile and responsive interfaces.

The course will consider how what we see is generated by the visual system, and what visual perception indicates about how the brain works. The evidence will be drawn from neuroscience, psychology, science history and philosophy. Although the discussions will be informed by visual system anatomy and physiology, the focus is on perception.

This course is an introduction to principles and techniques of visual communication, and provides opportunities for science and engineering majors to acquire practical skills in the visual computer arts, in a studio environment. Students will learn how to create graphics for print and web, animations, and interactive media, and how to use these techniques to effectively communicate scientific and engineering concepts for learning and teaching. This class involves three hands-on creative projects, which will be presented in class.

Throughout this course, we will use algebra to quantify and describe the world around us. Have you ever wondered how many songs can fit onto your flash drive? By the end of the course, you’ll have stronger skills for modeling problems, analyzing patterns, and using algebra to arrive at conclusions.

This MIT and Harvard co-taught course examines Japanese history and uncovers the skills and questions involved in reading history through digital imagery. The introductory module considers methodologies historians use to “visualize” the past, followed by three modules that explore the themes of Westernization, in Commodore Perry’s 1853-54 expedition to Japan; social protest, in Tokyo’s 1905 Hibiya Riot; and modernity, as seen in the archives of the major Japanese cosmetics company, Shiseido.

The course will cover the following topics in four modules:

Module 0: Introduction: New Historical Sources for a Digital Age (Professors Dower, Gordon, Miyagawa). Digitization has dramatically altered historians' access to primary sources, making large databases of the visual record readily accessible. How is historical methodology changing in response to this seismic shift? How can scholars, students, and the general public make optimal use of these new digital resources?

Module 1: Black Ships & Samurai (Professor Dower). Commodore Matthew Perry's 1853-54 expedition to force Japan to open its doors to the outside world is an extraordinary moment to look at by examining and comparing the visual representations left to us by both the American and Japanese sides of this encounter. This module also addresses the rapid Westernization undertaken by Japan in the half century following the Perry mission.

Module 2: Social Protest in Imperial Japan: The Hibiya Riot of 1905 (Professor Gordon). The dramatic daily reports from participants in the massive "Hibiya Riot" in 1905, the first major social protest in the age of "imperial democracy" in Japan, offer a vivid and fresh perspective on the contentious domestic politics of an emerging imperial power.

Module 3: Modernity in Interwar Japan: Shiseido & Consumer Culture (Professors Dower, Gordon, Weisenfeld). Exploring the vast archives of the Shiseido cosmetics company opens a fascinating window on the emergence of consumer culture, modern roles for women, and global cosmopolitanism from the 'teens through the 1920s and even into the era of Japanese militarism and aggression in the 1930s. This module will also tap other Visualizing Cultures units on modernization and modernity.

The course is based on the MIT "Visualizing Cultures" website devoted to image-driven research on Japan and China since the 19th century (visualizingcultures.mit.edu).

NOTES:

UTokyo001x and UTokyo002x: Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Parts 1 & 2 by University of Tokyo, follow in this series.

For MIT students: VJx will continue to be part of 21F.027J Visualizing Japan in the Modern World, a residential course taught by Professor Miyagawa in Fall semesters.

In addition to MITx and HarvardX, this project is supported by the U.S. Japan Foundation, the University of Tokyo, and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University.

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Tokyo emerged out of the ruins of war to become a large city of 10 million people in only a quarter of a century. During this process of change, the capital of a military empire that once invaded East Asia experienced occupation by the U.S. armed forces, hosted the Olympic Games, and transformed into a consumer hub where young people could enjoy economic “wealth.” It is important to know that this process was recorded in countless photographs, documentary films, TV programs, and so on. We will retrieve many of these archived pictures and videos and analyze what happened in postwar Tokyo from different perspectives. In Part 1, you will look at the changes that occurred in postwar Tokyo over a quarter of a century from four different perspectives: 1) occupation and Americanism; 2) imperial gaze and royal wedding; 3) The Olympic city; and 4) economic-cultural clash in Shinjuku. This examination of urban history will provide you with the insights necessary when considering changes in other large cities in Asia, such as Seoul, Beijing, and Bangkok, at the end of the twentieth century.

The history of postwar Tokyo reveals an essential feature of the modern city, i.e. the city as a place of visualities. In postwar Tokyo, countless gazes fell upon others; gazes from and upon Americans and the Emperor, gazes going up skyscrapers or rushing aggressively through the cityscape, and gazes twining and wriggling among classes, genders, and ethnic groups in downtown Tokyo. In Part 2, we will focus on the geopolitics of these gazes in modern Tokyo. What kinds of gazes fell upon the war orphans, the poor, and the marginalized groups in Tokyo? How did students themselves, who represented the vast accumulation of knowledge in Tokyo, perform in front of these gazes? Moreover, how did cinema or television shows, as media for these gazes, implicate the whole city? In answering these questions, we will identify the geopolitics historically involved in the practice of “visualizing postwar Tokyo.”

We are in the midst of an explosion of musical creativity as a result of technologies that allow you to record music using your laptop or tablet. Whether you are a singer, music producer, audio engineer, or just someone that likes to make good music with vocals, it is essential to have an understanding of vocal technologies for music production.

This music production course provides learners with insight into the voice itself, the recording environment, microphones, equalization, compressors, A-D-A conversion, the listening environment, human perception, natural widening concepts, artificial widening concepts, reverb, delay, and more. Grammy-award winning record producer, audio engineer, recording artist, and educator Prince Charles Alexander offers students a first-hand opportunity to learn the technologies behind vocal production, so that you can enhance your music productions with the most compelling and effective vocal tracks.

This course is for the singer and/or pianist interested in collaborative study of solo vocal performance. This term we will focus upon the works of Women Composers. Students will gather biographical data and explore art songs, operatic arias, choral masterpieces, and arrangements employing sacred and secular texts. Additionally, students will conduct inquiry into works indicative of their own heritage.

This course is for the singer and/or pianist interested in collaborative study of solo vocal performance. This term we will focus upon the works of Women Composers. Students will gather biographical data and explore art songs, operatic arias, choral masterpieces, and arrangements employing sacred and secular texts. Additionally, students will conduct inquiry into works indicative of their own heritage.

Volcanic eruptions are a powerful demonstration of the energy of the Earth´s interior. A materials-based understanding of the evolution of erupting systems provides a quantitative physico-chemical description of the nature of lava and magma and the role of experiments in quantifying the eruptive process.

In this course, students will iterate on a single project starting with sketches, user personas, and outlines. Through the process of user testing and iteration, students will create a highly refined and well-designed virtual reality experience—starting with low-fidelity content and continually improving it based on information from real users. Through the lens of a single application using Unity, user testing, and mobile VR, students will learn about things such as simulator sickness, movement mechanics, audio, user focus, and the overall design process. Once a student has completed the VR Design course, they are ready to create a well-designed VR experience from inception to final product.

After taking this course, you should be able to identify the pros & cons of the VR headsets currently on the market, identify future technologies that will increase the immersiveness of VR, and give examples of ways VR will impact certain industries, such as Education or Medicine. Throughout the course, you will be exposed to key concepts that are used in the VR industry such as Lightfield Displays or Foveated Rendering. You will also get a chance to prototype some of these concepts in the Unity Game Engine. At the end of each lesson, you will write a blog post, where you will design a VR applications for the headset of your choice using the concepts we have covered.

In this course, you’ll learn the the fundamentals of using the Unity Game Engine to build beautiful and performant VR scenes. Starting from basic game objects, you will learn about transforms and materials, so that you can position objects and make them look realistic. Next, you will experiment with animations and cameras in order to make our scenes more engaging in VR. And finally, you will add some complex lighting to your scene to really make your experience really stand out.

This course is designed to teach you how to make your VR experience more dynamic and responsive to your users. You will be exposed to C# programming and using it in the Unity interface. Upon completing this course,, you will have learned basic programming constructs such as methods, loops, variables, and using events and how to apply them in a VR environment.

Writing in the wake of the Civil War, poet Walt Whitman insisted that "the real war will never get in the books." Throughout American history, the experience of war has fundamentally shaped the ways that Americans think about themselves, their fellow Americans, and the meanings of national citizenship. War has also posed challenges of representation, both for those who fought as well as those who did not. This subject examines how Americans have told the stories of modern war in history, literature, and popular culture, and interprets them in terms of changing ideas about American national identity.

Over thirty years ago, confident in the superiority of American military power, the United States set out to "fix" the Greater Middle East. Since that time, U.S. troops, covert operatives and proxies have engaged in costly exertions in predominantly Muslim societies everywhere from the Levant and the Persian Gulf to East Africa and Central Asia. With what result? Washington's efforts have exacted a terrible toll, squandering vast amounts of blood and treasure. In the meantime, the Islamic world has become less stable while anti-American radicalism flourishes. America’s War for the Greater Middle East has failed, and that failure is irreversible.

This course offers a history of that war, for better understanding of the factors that inspired the United States to launch the conflict and to persist in a doomed enterprise. Inviting you to learn how the war unfolded from one phase to the next, from the era of Jimmy Carter to the age of Barack Obama, it catalogs the errors of judgment and implementation made along the way. Finally, it encourages you to consider alternative approaches to policy that might have better served the interests of the United States and of the people living in countries invaded, occupied, bombed and otherwise subjected to American punishment.